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Okay, I read the post over again since you commented and yes, I was a little hard on JP. I suppose that when you are the giant upon whom others stand there is a tendency to create initial theories based...

The uniformity and ease with which our discussion group discriminated between the feeling one gets around someone with a physical injury or disease as apposed to mental illness was thought provoking in contrast with the disparate views on why that...

I, like most people in life probably think of themselves as champion procrastinators. I tried Premack's suggestion and it failed utterly. Turns out when I both control the stimulus and the eject button I chose the eject button. I need...

The overwhelming message of the developmental chapter in our book other than that being a French child-psychologist (I think the hyphen is key here) is a ticket to immortality, is that there is a major struggle between experiential and innate...

Well, not really, unless this looks familiar: Take this test. How did you do? I scored a 0, indicating no issues in my color differentiation abilities. Given the greater genetic predisposition to color blindness in men, it would...

Very interesting data. Makes me think that while both nature and nurture are important contributing factors to overall IQ, nurture is the more important because it is the contributing aspect that can be controlled. As far as intelligence, it seems...

In religious studies, the feeling of finding yourself in a divine presence is called experiencing the numen. Monte Python would explain this feeling as one's apprehension of the vastness of the universe and our small place within it: Humanities and...

Okay, so I am a return to collage student. This is obvious by how readily I raise my hand and unabashedly give my opinion in discussion class. One of my undergraduate majors, oh so many years ago now, was religious...

A number of years ago I was introduced to the skeptical movement. The movement describes a skeptic as one that uses critical thinking skills to evaluate truth claims made about observable phenomena. It may be a politician discussing the need...

Comment Threads

Nice job Paul! I thought the article was very interesting and I really liked how you embedded the link to the article in the actual text for clarification. The only critique I could say is to include a little bit more information and possibly not as many questions. Great post though....

More likely that people will baby shop rather than we identify the set of genes that determines sexual orientation. But would you choose not to have a baby if you knew ahead of time it would be homosexual? If genetic science could alter the genes of fetuses to change the sexual orientation of your child would you?...

Excellect juxtaposition of the two graphs here Emily. The correlations clearly show that genetics plays a substantial role in intelligence yet the bottom graph, which represents a trend known as the "Flynn effect" must stem from some environmental cause. What those are exactly is still up for debate....

Being an animal lover might not be linked to the amygdala per se since we believe its primary function is for fight or flight responses to danger. The amygdala also is involved with other emotional processes which might be involved with you affection for dogs but I would suspect that many other areas of the brain also play an important role...